Taste of Cherry

Taste of Cherry (Persian: طعم گيلاس...‎, Ta’m-e gīlās...) is a 1997 Iranian drama film written, produced and directed by Abbas Kiarostami. It is a minimalist film about a man who drives through a city suburb, in search of someone who can carry out the task of burying him after he commits suicide. It was awarded the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, which it shared with The Eel.

Taste of Cherry
Promotional release poster
Directed byAbbas Kiarostami
Produced byAbbas Kiarostami
Written byAbbas Kiarostami
StarringHomayoun Ershadi
Abdolrahman Bagheri
Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari
Safar Ali Moradi
CinematographyHomayun Payvar
Distributed byZeitgeist Films
Release date
May, 1997 (Cannes)
September 28, 1997 (New York Film Festival)
January 30, 1998 (U.S.)
June 5, 1998 (UK)
Running time
95 minutes
CountryIran
LanguagePersian

Plot summary

Mr Badii (Homayoun Ershadi), a middle-aged man, drives through Tehran looking for someone to do a job for him, and he offers a large amount of money in return. During his drives with prospective candidates, Badii reveals that he plans to kill himself and has already dug the grave. He needs someone to throw earth on his body, after his death. He does not discuss why he wants to commit suicide.

His first recruit is a young, shy Kurdish soldier, who refuses to do the job and flees from Badii's car. His second recruit is an Afghan seminarist, who also declines because he has religious objections to suicide. The third is an Azeri taxidermist. He is willing to help Badii because he needs the money for his sick child, but tries to talk him out of it; he reveals that he too wanted to commit suicide a long time ago but chose to live when he tasted mulberries. The Azeri promises to throw earth on Badii if he finds him dead in the morning. That night, Badii lies in his grave while a thunderstorm begins. After a long blackout, the film ends by breaking the fourth wall with camcorder footage of Kiarostami and the film crew filming Taste of Cherry.

Cast
  • Homayoun Ershadi as Mr. Badii
  • Abdolrahman Bagheri as Mr. Bagheri, the taxidermist
  • Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari as Worker
  • Safar Ali Moradi as Soldier
  • Mir Hossein Noori as Seminarian

Style
The consistent close up of the character Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) in Taste of Cherry is later juxtaposed by a panoramic overhead view as his car moves across the hills

The film is minimalist in that it is shot primarily with long takes; the pace is leisurely and there are long periods of ambient (background) sound, which the closing sequence shows the crew recording. Mr. Badii is rarely shown in the same shot as the person he is talking to (this is partly because during the filming, director Kiarostami was sitting in the car's passenger seat).

Music

The film does not include a background score, except for the ending titles. This features a trumpet piece, Louis Armstrong's 1929 adaptation of "St. James Infirmary Blues." The only song featured in the film is "Khuda Bowad Yaret" (May God be your protector) by Afghan singer Ahmad Zaher, which is played in the background on a radio.

Release

Taste of Cherry was awarded the prestigious Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival in the year of its release,[1] tied with Shohei Imamura's The Eel.

Reception

When the film was released in the United States, however, it met with a split reaction among critics and audiences. Roger Ebert wrote a scathing review in The Chicago Sun-Times, giving the film a mere 1 out of 4 stars. Ebert dismissed the film as "excruciatingly boring" and added,[2]

"I understand intellectually what Kiarostami is doing. I am not impatiently asking for action or incident. What I do feel, however, is that Kiarostami's style here is an affectation; the subject matter does not make it necessary, and is not benefited by it. If we're to feel sympathy for Badhi, wouldn't it help to know more about him? To know, in fact, anything at all about him? What purpose does it serve to suggest at first he may be a homosexual? (Not what purpose for the audience--what purpose for Badhi himself? Surely he must be aware his intentions are being misinterpreted.) And why must we see Kiarostami's camera crew--a tiresome distancing strategy to remind us we are seeing a movie? If there is one thing Taste of Cherry does not need, it is such a reminder: The film is such a lifeless drone that we experience it only as a movie."

Ebert later went on to add the film to a list of his most hated movies of all time.[3]

In his own review of Kiarostami's film, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader awarded it a full four stars. Responding to Ebert's criticisms, Rosenbaum wrote:[4]

"A colleague who finds Taste of Cherry "excruciatingly boring" objects in particular to the fact that we don’t know anything about Badii, to what he sees as the distracting suggestion that Badii might be a homosexual looking for sex, and to what he sees as the tired "distancing strategy" of reminding us at the end that we’re seeing a movie. From the perspective of the history of commercial Western cinema, he has a point on all three counts. But Kiarostami couldn’t care less about conforming to that perspective, and given what he can do, I can’t think of any reason he should care... the most important thing about the joyful finale is that it’s the precise opposite of a "distancing effect." It does invite us into the laboratory from which the film sprang and places us on an equal footing with the filmmaker, yet it does this in a spirit of collective euphoria, suddenly liberating us from the oppressive solitude and darkness of Badii alone in his grave. Shifting to the soldiers reminds us of the happiest part of Badii’s life, and a tree in full bloom reminds us of the Turkish taxidermist’s epiphany — though the soldiers also signify the wars that made both the Kurdish soldier and the Afghan seminarian refugees, and a tree is where the Turk almost hanged himself. Kiarostami is representing life in all its rich complexity, reconfiguring elements from the preceding 80-odd minutes in video to clarify what’s real and what’s concocted. (The "army" is under Kiarostami’s command, but it is Ershadi — an architect friend of the filmmaker in real life — who passes Kiarostami a cigarette.) Far from affirming that Taste of Cherry is "only" a movie, this wonderful ending is saying, among other things, that it’s also a movie. And we don’t have to remember all of the lyrics of "St. James Infirmary" to know that death is waiting for us around the corner."

Since the film's release, multiple other critics have also declared it a masterpiece; in the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound poll, six critics and two directors named Taste of Cherry one of the 10 best films ever made.[5]

Home media

On June 1, 1999, The Criterion Collection released the film onto DVD. On July 21, 2020, Criterion released the film on Blu-ray with a new 4K restoration.[6]

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References
  1. "Festival de Cannes: Taste of Cherry". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 2009-09-23.
  2. "Taste Of Cherry". Chicago Sun-Times.
  3. "Ebert's Most Hated". RogerEbert.com.
  4. Rosenbaum, Jonathan (May 29, 1998). "Fill in the Blanks". jonathanrosenbaum.net. Retrieved April 25, 2012.
  5. "Taste of Cherry, The (1997)". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on August 20, 2012. Retrieved June 20, 2015.
  6. "Taste of Cherry". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved May 8, 2020.
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